since last time...

I don't really have a whole lot to say today except that I wish I was blogging more. A lack of inspiration combined with being really busy ( the #1 blogger excuse, courtesy of lazy.com/blogger)  has accounted for my invisibleness on this blog. However, I am super excited to start a new series called "Make Your Own:______." Obviously the blank will be filled in with exciting things, mostly food.

Over Christmas and New Year's I was sick for a couple weeks which allowed me to read a lot. I read the book "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" by Barbara Kingslover. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it. It's fast, interesting, and very yummy (as much as a book can be). Besides being all of that, it inspired me to start making some of the things that we buy at the store without thinking if we could make them or not. So here's to a delicious (hopefully) expedition of making and not buying bread, butter, cheese, yogurt, jams, and whatever else I can without going broke or ruining my taste buds.

And just because no blog post should be without a picture, here's some of what we've been eating and making since my last post.

taco night. yuuuuhm! steak and chicken, cilantro-lime rice, sauteed red onions and peppers, guacamole, salsa, sour cream, and siracha (for an extra kick of heat)  

Black Pepper and Nutmeg Popovers from Bon Appetit's November Magazine.

This is such a yummy, fast lunch. Homemade bun sliced in 1/2 with a fried egg and topped with Trader Joe's chicken andouille sausage. Their sausages, while expensive, are some of my favorites ever. They don't have any nitrates, are already precooked and have such a delicious flavor. I highly recommend them!

What yummy food have you cooked recently?

English Lavender Honey Cake

After bringing my lavender plant in for the winter, I harvested some lovely purple pods and dried them out. I had no idea what to do with them, so of course I asked all my super-savvy- facebook friends what to do with it. One of the suggestions I got back was a honey lavender cake. To be honest I had never heard of such a cake so I went to my electronic best friend, Google, and asked her.  (yes, google is officially a her) Turns out there are lots of recipes for honey lavender cake so I picked the one that looked most unhealthy and went shopping for ingredients. 

Just to warn you, this 9-inch cake packs in a lot of butter. It's very delicious and moist, best eaten warm. Don't skip the glaze- it makes this cake.   

Cake Ingredients:

1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter

½ cup  sugar

½ cup honey *the recipe originally calls for lavender honey, but who has that???

3 eggs

2 cups  flour

1 tsp baking powder

½ tsp baking soda

½ tsp salt

½ tsp cinnamon

½ tsp chopped dried lavender, plus more for garnish

½ cup sour cream

Glaze Ingredients:

2 teaspoons of honey

¾ cup confectioners sugar

4 tsp. lemon juice *I left this out

Directions:

~Preheat the oven to 325F. Butter  and flour a 9-inch cake tin. (you can use parchment on the bottom if you like)

~Cream the butter (bring to room temp if possible), sugar, and honey together until light and fluffy. ~Beat the eggs lightly together   in a separate bowl and slowly incorporate into the butter base.

~Mix the dry ingredients together (all remaining ingredients but the sour cream) and stir well.

~Fold ⅓ of the flour mixture gently into the butter base, then about ⅓ of the sour cream. Repeat twice more until all ingredients are just incorporated.

~Turn the batter into your prepared cake tin and bake in the oven for about 50 minutes, or until a cake tester comes out clean. 

 ~When you cake is done, remove it from the oven and allow it to cool for about ten minutes, then invert onto a rack to cool.

~When cool, transfer to a plate and make the icing: whisk the lemon juice and honey together, then whisk in the powdered sugar (ideally you’d sift the powdered sugar in to remove any lumps).

~Drizzle over your cake, allowing the icing to trickle down the sides.

~Sprinkle with additional lavender. Allow frosting to set, and serve.

Original recipe from here: the Three Clever Sisters Blog

Happy Christmas

I've always been partial to the british version "happy Christmas." It's not that I don't like the word "merry," but ever since I heard Kate Winslet say "happy christmas" in the movie The Holiday it just stuck. So happy Christmas to all of you as we celebrate the season of Christ's birth!

This is the picture we used for our christmas card this year. We look like nice people. 

But if you know us well, this is who we really are ;)

Happy Christmas everyone!

Can't-Stop-Eating-Them, Easiest-Ever Homemade Flour Tortillas

We love Mexican food at our house. We love Mexican food out of our house too. (the Chipotle in our area gets a lot of our money) Recently we've been resolving to make our own bread and bread products. No buying sandwich bread, bagels or english muffins or any bread-products at the store (or farmer's market, or anywhere). We've been doing it for a couple months and it's going really well! We haven't even been tempted to buy our usual favorite from the store because homemade tastes so much better! Unfortunately for us, the no-bread-buying rule also applied to tortillas. We never made tortillas before this time and were a little dubious at to how they would turn out. Well, let me tell you- these tortillas are amazingly delicious! You won't want to buy the ones from the store after tasting these. They're extremely simple to make and only use ingredients that 90% of households already have on hand. Ok, enough chit-chat. Here's the recipe: (found on pinterest)

Easy and Utterly Delicious Homemade Flour Tortillas

Ingredients:

3 cups flour

1 tsp. salt*

1/3 cup veg. oil

1 cup warm water

Directions:

Combine all the ingredients until they form a dough. (your kitchen aid mixer isn't needed-just do it in a bowl and 30 sec. later dough has formed) 

Roll the dough into a big ball and pinch off a 1-2 inch piece. 

Roll out the piece on a floured surface. Make it a circle.

Put the raw tortilla into a flat pan on medium high heat and cook until there are little brown speck on both sides (you'll have to flip the tortilla to cook both sides).

Continue pinching off pieces, rolling and cooking until all your dough is used.**

*we thought they could have used a little more salt, but that just depends on your tastes. We'll probably up it to 1 1/2 tsp. next time.

** This recipe made 19 tortillas for us. Some of them were a little bigger than was ideal, you could easily get 24 tortillas out of this batch.

Do enjoy mexican food? Corn or flour tortillas? If you've made your own tortillas before, I'd love to hear about that too!

Happy Tortilla-ing!

Gettin' My Groove On With Frimoo Glasses-A Sponsored Post

Usually when I get emails from companies to blog about their products I just delete them. First of all, I usually assume that they're spam, and secondly, I think "how in the world do they know I have a blog???" Freaky. 

However, when I got an email from Firmoo.com, I thought what if it IS real? What if I really CAN get a free pair of glasses for my aging eyes? (bad eyesight runs deep in my family) I was desperately in need of a new pair of glasses. I had ordered a super cheap pair from another online company and they were literally falling apart.I went to Firmoo's website and was pretty surprised with what they had to offer. Stylish frames. Good quality. Good customer service. and um, FREE.

After a bit of browsing I choose my frames (they're selling for around $36), entered my vision and PD info onto their easy order form, and about 10 days later got them in the mail!

I was surprised with their quality and how sturdy they are. My glasses came in a hard leather-ish case with a cloth and also a glasses screwdriver-keychain and extra arm joint screws. 

Take a look at my new specs:

sweater: Eddie Bower via savers, dress: savers, leather belt: savers, riding boots: marshalls, earrings: charming charlie, necklace: vintage, glasses: firmoo.com

So guess what? You can get a free pair too! That's part of the perks to blogging about this sweet deal I got. Click the link to get yourself some awesome specs: Free Glasses

I love that geek glasses are totally in. Who wears them best? Um, Zooey Deschanel, obviously. Someone please tell me that I'm not the only New Girl fan out there.

Our Last Leg: Vernazza, Switzerland, Paris and Madrid

Looking back over all the amazing times we had during our European adventure makes it really hard to pick just a couple photos for you. However, I'm FORCING myself to finally complete my blog series on our trip to europe this past summer in one short post. (believe me, I could go on for years sharing picts with you guys. however, there are other things that are also important to blog about like pumpkin recipes and such)

So without further ado, here goes:

 If you remember from the last post, we had been in Rome and Florence where the temps were just amazingly hot. We were so relieved to get to the Cinque Terre (5 little towns on the seacoast all connected by hiking trails). We spent a couple days cooling off in Vernazza, this charming tiny coastal town. It was one of our favorite stops on our entire trip. (and the tan I got there is just starting to wear off my legs 3 months later!)

 After Vernazza, we went to Basel, Switzerland and spent some time with our friend (and also violinist in our quartet). It was super fun to go wandering around this city! I could picture myself living here. On hot days, people get floaties and just float down the Rhine (pictured above) riding with the current. We spotted about 30 people while we were there-it's quite funny.

We went grocery shopping in Basel- cooking for ourselves and our host. I almost laughed when I saw this bottle labeled "American Sauce." I wonder what in the world that tastes like.

After Switzerland, we went to Paris and believe me, as a book lover, it took a LOT of control not to go crazy buying all these old books. There were tons of carts along the bridges selling books, art, vintage art and everything in between. I came home with 1 print. The art is so cheap too!

 Rome has beautiful fountains, but no one can deny that Paris has her fair share as well.

 Le Tour Eiffel at dusk. Rooooomantic. 

Paris Opera House. Really magnificent inside. 

Square where Victor Hugo's apartment is. If you ever visit here, go to the museum/house- it's free!

Do NOT Skip going to the Shakespeare and Company bookstore if you are in Paris! It's extremely quaint and amazing. You aren't allowed to take pictures inside but it's filled with old and new books and a rickety old staircase to upstairs where there's nooks with old couches and victorian sofas in the middle of book piles, and a piano.  

Our time in Madrid was short, but it was an amazingly beautiful city by night. We stayed with some wonderful couchsurfing hosts and had a late dinner (we started eating at 11. we were told this is pretty traditional for the summer time.)

So there you have it! Just a few little tidbits of our last leg. Perhaps someday we'll go back. I already can't wait!

What The Sistine Chapel Looks Like (and other assorted Roman and Florentine places))

After we left Venice (with a short stay in Padova) we started on our way to Rome. I'd have to say, my favorite thing about Rome was to wander among the ruins. There's not much that's truly amazing and horrifying at the same time, but this city had an abundance of landmarks that left me with this feeling. We arrived at night and took a wonderful walk down to the Colosseum. 

 Look at the size of the humans compared to this place! It was much, MUCH grander than I thought. The knowledge of what it was used for made walking around it much more scary than you would think.

( can you find the famous Creation of Man scene?) 

(did you know Michelangelo painted this entire ceiling and laying flat on his back - paint sometimes dripping into his eyes?) Amazing.

The next morning we decided to go to the Vatican City and tour  the museum and the Sistine Chapel. That was probably one of the most horrible museum experiences I have ever had.  Let's just say the NYC Subway doesn't even begin to describe how crowded the ENTIRE museum was. (and I'm from NYC, remember?) By the end of the 2 hours we shuffled shoulder to shoulder with everyone else, we were sweaty, smelly, thirsty and just glad to be out. I should also mention that Rome was having a severe heat wave this day. 

One thing you should know about this: while you're shuffling along  in the corridor and stairs leading into the Sistene Chapel, you'll hear an announcement in about 6 different languages: "You are about to enter the Sistene Chapel. Please remain silent while in the Sistene Chapel. No Photos Please." (haha, like that's going to happen. (there were about 2,000 of us in the chapel at once) The next thing you should know is that when you actually get inside the Chapel, there will be 5 or 6 security guards shouting "SILENCE PLEASE!" about every other second. So much for the silence. 

 The beautiful pines of Rome. 

There were lot of colorful mailboxes in the Vatican City. It's "the thing" to send a postcard home from the Vatican.

 A few days later we traveled to Florence, a beautiful city in which we had only 4 hours. The heat wave was still in full boom (one of the hottest in history, by the way) and we were anxious to get to our next destination- the Italian Riviera. (hello, beach!)

The bridge above is the Ponte Vecchio - extremely old (built in the 12th century) and beautiful.  Originally built for shops selling gold and silver it has changed very little since then. It still has the quaintest shops selling.....gold and silver. 

 A view of Florence from a little garden on a hill I found.

Church where Galileo and Michelangelo are burried. 

So there my friends, in a tiny-little nutshell, are some picts. from our time in Rome and Florence. You should know that the best gelato I've ever had (and we had some almost every day in every city) (it's the only way to keep cool) is in Florence.